


to see a firework burn out

by visceraEffect



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Angst, Canonical Character Death, Fireworks, M/M, dream selves, fluff-angst, implied smutty fluff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-11
Updated: 2014-03-11
Packaged: 2018-01-15 08:42:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,105
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1298614
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/visceraEffect/pseuds/visceraEffect
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“What the hell is a firework, you shitty brat?” Levi in his bed-headed glory glares at the too-peppy Eren.</p><p>“They’re like...how do I explain them? Flashes of light, and lots of sound, it’s really pretty, I promise! I wish you could’ve seen what I saw in my dream. Hey, Corporal, when we obliterate all the Titans, let’s watch fireworks together!”</p><p>Levi really thought that it would be possible; that was how bright Eren’s smile was. AU!</p>
            </blockquote>





	to see a firework burn out

**Author's Note:**

> I swear this was going to be a happy, sweet, cutesy fic between Levi and Eren, then Eren up and decided he had to die. :l Thanks Eren.
> 
> I don't own any of these characters :((((

**when these things go too far, it’s hard to stop**

There’s still some resemblance to Eren Jaeger. The thick, brown-hair he has spent years tugging at in bed and running his fingers through is matted with blood and some parts are ripped off by Titan fingers. Greedy for his flesh. Levi shudders and with a shaky hand, he closes the glassy, scared eyes of his lover. He still won’t admit that Eren is his lover to the world, but maybe once he’s thrived off his memories of more than one good time with the brat, just maybe, he will.

 

Eren’s missing an arm and a part of a foot, and whatever parts left of him are covered in blood. When Levi carries him back to the Walls and back to his waiting friends, the Corporal isn’t sure whether or not to keep his impersonal facade. It hurts, seeing the only remote thing he has ever had to a family cry over someone he considered his lover and a real lover at that.

 

Maybe he shouldn’t have let Eren coerce him into a simple kiss. Levi had thought it would be nothing to him, that sharing spit with a brat once to silence him was going to be easy to break off, but he had gotten captivated. Captivated by the taste of Eren’s saliva and the heat the boy exuded when he was excited and pressed up against the Corporal.

 

Levi lays the shifter on the ground, but careful to cushion his head with what is left of his green Scouting Legion cape. The silver feathers seem to mock Humanity’s Strongest Soldier, and the pale man simply turns away, hiding his face from the rest of his squad.

 

He drowns out their crying and their sobbing and the heart-breaking realization that Eren Jaeger will never smile that heart-stopping smile or kiss him senseless again or leave red scratches and purple bruises on his body ever again.

 

Later, Erwin finds Levi surrounded by glasses of fine wine, a collection that the Corporal has been stockpiling since a long time ago, drinking his way into a stupor. Erwin knows by the haunted, dead look in his friend’s eyes that Jaeger’s death meant more than just the death of a squad mate, because when Petra and Oluo and the rest died, Levi didn’t drink himself liver-dead.

 

Here the Corporal lies on an armchair that smells like clean and _his ridiculously unique_ scent, piss-drunk and tears streaming down his face, wondering if letting Eren Jaeger into his heart was worth it all.

  
  


**i dreamt a little dream of you and me**

 

Eren is tossing and turning in his bed and Levi is wide awake and annoyed at the shitty brat that dares to disturb his sleep. When had this routine began, the Corporal doesn’t remember, but it doesn’t really matter in the end.

 

Reaching over, he shakes the poor thrashing boy awake and Eren is disorientated, with a vicious blush on his face and a sappy smile plastered on his lips.

 

“Oi, brat, what’s up with that idiotic expression?” Levi rolls his eyes and hopes his question doesn’t sound as curious as he really is. The boy scrunches his eyes shut and grins, choosing to not answer the corporal and instead tackle him so they’re both tangled up in limbs and blankets.

 

“I had a really good dream, and you were in it, Levi,” Eren chirps, too brightly for Levi’s liking. When he’s that happy, it means that dream-Levi did something silly and sappy and later, Eren will try and persuade the real version of him to do it. “It was absolutely wonderful…”

 

The clarity in his green eyes fade a little as a warm haze settles over him. The dreamy smile on his lips is enough to make Levi flush a little; Eren is ridiculously cute when he’s fantasizing of some sort of fluffy moment. And he tends to do it a lot in the mornings, which makes Levi a little more excited to wake up and see those small expression on his lover’s face.

 

“We were holding hands and it was nighttime and you were whispering that you had a secret to show me,” now Eren’s off on a tirade, but Levi’s too tired to stop him, so he lets him blabber his mouth off. “And when I looked up, there was a lot of loud noise and really bright lights, mostly orange and red, really pretty colors, and you told me they were fireworks!”

 

The brown-haired boy blushes wildly before whispering, “You kissed me so softly, I knew it was a dream.”

 

So he’s into that kind of soft loving, Levi notes and tells himself to catch the boy by surprise using it one day. The pale-skinned man wonders if he wants to transform himself into the perfect Levi in Eren’s dreams to please him, but he furiously denies it with all his might.

 

“What the hell is a firework, you shitty brat?” Levi in his bedheaded glory glares at the too-peppy Eren. He tries to sound gruff, but it ends up deflating into a tired kind of scold.

 

“They’re like...how do I explain them? Flashes of light, and lots of sound, it’s really pretty, I promise! I wish you could’ve seen what I saw in my dream. Hey, Corporal, when we obliterate all the Titans, let’s watch fireworks together!” Eren clasps his hands around one of his cold ones, the warmth so welcome and so familiar to the older male.

 

Eren’s smile is so bright, it almost hurts. Levi really thinks, for a delusional moment, that it’s possible. That is how bright Eren’s smile is.

  
  


**a fantasy world where there’s no fighting and we’re so in love**

 

The grass is a little rough under his palm and it feels crackly and dry and wet all at the same time. It’s dark all around him and Eren takes in a deep, deep breath, filling his lungs with the wet and dry air. He can’t really see anything, but he knows he’s on a high hill, overlooking some unknown city that certainly doesn’t have any Walls and any Titans on the outside.

 

The sky looks so unnaturally peaceful and there’s not a cloud in sight. Eren feels like he’s comfortable in this beautiful, weird world.

 

He hears a little scuffling noise and when he turns, he sees a very familiar pale face, but the dark circles are fading and there’s a small smile that Eren almost never sees on his face.

 

“Levi!” The older male sits next to Eren, leaning closer in an uncharacteristic sweet gesture that makes the younger boy blush and his heart rate speed up. “H-how are you?”

 

“I should be asking you that, brat,” Levi hasn’t dropped his catchphrase, much to Eren’s disappointment, but at the same time, it manages to keep the normalcy between them. Admittedly, Eren would have felt weird if Levi suddenly called him by his first name constantly after years of insulting petnames. “I’ve got a surprise for you.”

 

Levi reaches over and grabs the green-eyed teen's hands, giving the younger male a small confident smirk that absolutely melts him into a pile of mushy, blushing goo. Eren feels like the heroine of a sappy love story at the moment, swooning over some dream version of Levi because the real life Levi would never do this sappy crap. The teen is suddenly hypersensitive to their touching shoulders and the spots where his fingers clutch tightly at his.

 

“Fireworks.”

 

A loud noise suddenly startles the brown-haired teen and the night sky is illuminated by vivid reds and bright flashes of light and oranges and citrusy colors that make Eren gasp in delight. It’s beautiful, and when he glances at Levi, he realizes he’s said it out loud.

 

Levi only has the same cunning, hot smirk on his face and stares deeply into Eren’s eyes and remarks, “Yeah, he’s beautiful.”

 

Eren can only blush and stammer, until the dream-corporal steals his breath away with a soft, romantic kiss and the whisper of, “ _I love you, Eren Jaeger_.”

  
  


**still loving you is a pain and i think i’m masochistic**

 

Levi has cleaned himself up pretty well, he thinks. The traces of his drunken smashing and internal bleeding _is it his heart or his liver that he’s talking about?_ are gone and he looks the same as he did before his expedition. Before Eren’s departure from the physical realm. Was it a dream, Levi blindly wonders and wanders into the mess hall, hoping to see a head of messy brown hair.

 

All he sees are faces stained with tears and even Mikasa doesn’t bother to keep her impassive face.

 

One-legged Marco is rubbing Jean’s back with his good arm and his broken one is weakly holding a tissue to his face in a vain attempt to stem the tears. Jean is hiding, but the shaking in his shoulders is enough to tell the Corporal that he’s crying too.

 

Levi walks by and he hears the dark, hurting muttering of the horse-faced kid that always picked fights with Eren, “Goddammit, who told you you could die before everyone else?” It takes all of his willpower not to pat Jean’s shoulder and say _i understand how you feel, Kirschstein,_ but he makes it out and he plans to never see those kids again until the burial.

 

The pale man knows he has to come to terms with his death.

 

He just doesn’t know how.

  
  


**he’s still burning brightly, the shitty little firework, just someplace else**

 

The burial is simple, like what Eren wanted it to be like. His closest friends and a couple of extras, surrounded by green space of the graveyard he didn’t belong in. A little white casket with a white-faced prince laying like Sleeping Beauty. Levi would have willingly swept that frail body into his arms and kissed him in front of everyone, if that would have made his eyes open once more.

 

But such frivolous dreams are for the weak and for the children.

 

Death is death, and Levi pinches his leg in a seldom-seen suit that he wears to formal occasions in an effort to stem the tears.

 

It works, kind of, and his eyes only glisten for a moment, before the pale man bites back his weakness.

 

“He was my best friend,” Armin’s words are choked up and his eyes are red-rimmed and make the blue stand out even more.

 

“He was the first person to accept me and hold me as a friend, when I was at my loneliest,” Mikasa’s small eulogy is enough to make most of the people sitting in black chairs shed a few meaningful tears.

 

“He got on my nerves every day and it became so routine that now, when he’s gone, it feels like there’s something big missing, and I hate it!” Jean is so broken that Levi almost laughs, because when Eren was here, the blonde-haired male made it seem like he hated him, when the entire time, he’s loved him _more_ than anyone else.

 

 _He was the goddamn light in my life._ Levi adds silently as the only noise breaking the silence are stifled sobs.

 

The ceremony is over and after the casket is lowered, everyone shuffles away together to cry in a more private place and rant about how unfair the world is to take away what they’ve cherished for the past years.

 

Levi, on the other hand, stays for longer, ignoring the curious gazes that linger on his back. He clenches his fists at his sides, looking at the too simple gravestone innocently in front of him.

 

His thoughts are so cluttered and he doesn’t know where to start. It’s the first time he has ever felt this disorganized.

 

The corporal stares at the sky and wonders if when night falls, the “fireworks” will come out and startle him like it startled Eren in his dream. Levi wonders if he will ever be able to see these fireworks, and if they will be as beautiful as Eren told him they would be. The setting sun bathes everything in a vivid orange that he described and as he opens his palm, gazing at the stubby life line on his hand _that lasted longer than Eren's_ , he lets out a rough bark of a laugh.

 

“I don't need fireworks in my life.”

 

But in his head, because he doesn’t want to admit it to the world, _no one needs to know his true feelings about the shitty brat anyway_ , Levi thinks that Eren has been enough to brighten his night sky.


End file.
